Narrator: This company hauls in 60,000 pounds
of crawfish a day.
Once they're out of the water, the clock starts ticking.
Farmers have just a few hours to get them weighed, sold,
and into coolers.
And these little guys have to stay alive the whole time.
Madison: As soon as they're dead, it starts breaking them
down extremely fast.
Yeah, they'll get mushy and spoil.
Narrator: These crustaceans are big business
for Louisiana.
They contribute $300 million
to the state's economy and end up across the US.
Narrator: But this industry
didn't even take off until recent decades.
In the '80s, some rice farmers took a massive gamble.
They experimented with cultivating the crawfish that lived
below their fields. And it paid off.
In just nine years, Madison McIntyre has built one
of the biggest crawfish companies in the state,
handling up to 4 million pounds a year.
I Never imagined that it would be to this level,
nor was it our goal.
It kind of just happened organically.
Narrator: But because the farmed crawfish industry
is so young,
it's like the Wild West — unregulated and fast-moving.
So how exactly did Louisiana's rice farmers
come to harvest crawfish?
And why do they stay in such a tough business?
Crawfish are freshwater crustaceans related
to lobsters and shrimp, and they're native to Louisiana's
bayous, rivers, swamps, and rice fields like this one.
Madison: And if you look closely, you'll see some holes.
There's one right here.
Narrator: They go by all sorts of names.
Crawdads, crayfish, mudbugs.
They come out the mud, literally.
Narrator: From late September to October,
rice farmers flood their fields,
and the crawfish emerge from their burrows hungry.
By November, he can start catching them in rows of traps.
Mauricio Guillen, nicknamed Junior, heads out
on the crawfish boat, which doesn't have
a steering wheel.
Madison: And all that's controlled
by foot pedals that are at his feet.
Narrator: Armed with thick gloves,
he empties each trap.
He has just seven seconds to dump out a trap,
load in more bait, and drop it
back in the water.
Madison: And that's just how much ground it covers between each trap.
Narrator: He's got to move quickly so the crawfish
don't die in the Louisiana heat.
Madison: Junior's pretty fast.
He's a lot faster than me.
Narrator: This table helps them weed out
any unwanted critters, and it separates the crawfish by size.
Madison: The smaller peelers can fall through here.
You know, they'll go
from underneath here and then into these sacks.
Narrator: But crawfish's big break
didn't even come until the 1980s.
Rice farmers' profits were dipping.
So, looking for another income stream, they took a big risk
and cultivated crawfish alongside the grain.
Fourth-generation rice farmer Jim Johnson was one of them.
Jim: It just works almost perfect together.
There's almost no better combination
of vegetation to go with crawfish.
Narrator: The rice plant provides
a wetland for crawfish breeding
and shade from the sun and plays host
to microorganisms like algae, larvae, and worms.
Jim: The crawfish will feed off of those.
Narrator: The crawfish's poop then fertilizes the fields,
and the two crop seasons line up perfectly.
When farmers harvest the rice,
the crawfish have safely burrowed themselves
deep into the mud.
Once the rice is picked,
crawfish emerge from their burrows with babies.
By winter, they're ready to be harvested and eaten.
Soon, buyers all over the south, from Texas
to South Carolina, began gobbling up the mudbugs.
What was once just a local eat
now makes up more than half of Jim's business.
Narrator: Today, the crops
are an important part of economies
like Welsh, Louisiana's.
Madison: All the crawfish in the whole nation are farmed
in a 35-miles-square radius of this area.
Narrator: From November to July,
rice farmers end up with tons
of crawfish packed into sacks like these.
Junior and his team will load them onto trucks
and book it to the crawfish dock.
In the summer months, they have to get the mudbugs weighed
and in the cooler within three hours,
or else the heat could kill them.
And dead crawfish breed bacteria.
Once cooked, it's technically still edible,
but the meat falls apart, and it doesn't taste as good.
Madison pays rice farmers about $1.25 a pound
for their catch.
Unlike most crawfish-mongers, he doesn't come
from a farming family.
In 2014, he and his friend Charlie
started selling them out of his truck in New Orleans.
Madison: At an abandoned gas station,
we would serve boiled crawfish through there
on the weekend.
Narrator: It was so successful,
he bought more trucks and expanded
into a full-fledged enterprise, Parish Seafood Wholesale.
While a lot of crawfish companies focus on just one part
of the process, Madison does it all,
along with his dog, June. He grows his own crawfish
and buys from 36 other rice farmers.
He also owns a company that hauls the catch,
a processing plant,
and restaurants, cutting out the middlemen.
Madison: Now, we have a little over 60 employees.
We run 14 trucks seven days a week, 24/7.
Narrator: Madison washes some of his catch
on this $150,000 machine.
Every day.
But you get used to it. Like, it doesn't really hurt.
Narrator: Not only do they have to watch their fingers,
they have to watch out for runaways.
Madison: And they're escape artists. So yeah.
Narrator: Crawfish have to hit the coolers
right after washing to keep them alive until they're sold.
Madison tries to move the high-grade, larger crawfish
within 12 to 24 hours, but that's not always easy.
Madison: It's all pretty much done on a handshake.
There's no contracts.
You have to be careful, because people can buy all
of your crawfish in the beginning of the season,
and then as soon as the catch picks up,
they can leave you and buy from somebody else.
Narrator: Stranding crawfish in these fridges.
It can be a lot of pressure.
Narrator: The low-grade, smaller crawfish are easier
for him to move, because Madison just sells it to himself.
Then he sends it to his Breaux Bridge factory
to process the tail meat.
Workers start unloading the crawfish off
the trucks starting at 4 a.m.
They dump them into tanks
and skim off any dead or weak ones from the top.
Then they give the mudbugs a wash.
A conveyor belt drops them into a giant steamer basket.
Using a system of tracks,
a worker carefully lowers the basket
into a vat of boiling water. Just like lobsters,
crawfish go in alive to get the best flavor.
That's why it's so important to keep them kicking
until this moment.
It takes just two minutes to cook them through.
Then Madison and the team rake them
down this steel table into the peeling room.
Leona Williams has been peeling here for 50 years.
Narrator: She can peel about 40 pounds' worth a day.
Narrator: They get paid $2.50 a pound.
Narrator: The team in the next room
vacuum-seals the tails into 1-pound bags.
Because competition is so stiff,
Madison wouldn't tell us where he sells these,
but he said they end up across the US.
He also sends tail meat and whole crawfish
to three restaurants he owns in the state,
cooking up all kinds of Louisiana delicacies.
Crawfish have been an important part
of southern Louisiana's culture for centuries.
According to the Native Heritage Project,
the Houma Indigenous people named themselves after the word
for crawfish and used it as a war symbol.
In the 1800s, a wave of French Canadians
settled in Louisiana
after being forced out of Canada by the British.
They came to be known as the Cajuns,
and they brought their lobster recipes with them.
But short on lobster here, they swapped in crawfish.
By the 1960s, crawfish had their own festival,
and Creole restaurants
were adding them to menus in New Orleans.
It was definitely a Louisiana delicacy.
It didn't really get much farther than the state.
Narrator: Crawfish has since gone definitively national.
But locals still cook them into staples
like etouffee, boudin, and boils.
Madison's business partner, Charlie Johnson,
uses a Cajun cooking style in his crawfish boils.
Charlie: Make sure the drain's shut.
This is liquid boil, so I'm adding that to the water.
Narrator: He first boils the corn and potatoes,
drains them, and then cooks the crawfish last.
Charlie: Right there,
when the tail starts to kind of separate from the head,
there's that little white line.
You can see the meat.
That's usually a telltale sign that they're ready.
Narrator: While New Orleans Creole chefs
add dry seasoning to the water crawfish boil in,
out here, Cajuns dump on the dry seasoning
after they're cooked.
Charlie: We shut that ice chest, and we let them steam.
I think the magic happens in the ice chest.
That's when they start to soak up those seasonings.
Narrator: Down here, folks stop by the restaurant
well into the evening.
The Cajuns also love their dip,
while back in NOLA, they don't use any sauce.
Narrator: With his factory weigh station and restaurants,
Madison has become a considerable player
in the crawfish industry.
We're building a new facility that's going to be focused
on air-freight crawfish.
Narrator: But his success hasn't come
without its challenges.
As the industry boomed over the last 20 years,
lots of people tried to get in on the action.
By 2019, the number of crawfish farms
in the state had doubled.
And then came inflation.
Madison says costs soared 40%.
Last year, fuel alone cost him $150,000 more than normal.
That's a lot of money that would've been profit.
Yeah, labor's pretty high, and we have mostly foreign labor.
Narrator: Ninety-five percent of his staff
is working in the US on a visa.
Madison: And we always have to house them
and pay for transportation.
You can't find local
or American labor that would work as hard
as these guys do side by side with us.
Narrator: Madison says he pays them just
under $14 an hour, almost double the minimum wage.
Madison: And we'll put in 15- and 18-hour days, seven days a week.
So it's very demanding.
We don't get to see our family as much during the season,
but they don't get to see their family at all.
Narrator: Soaring operation costs
and low margins have forced dozens
of Louisiana crawfish companies to close.
Madison: And so the people that came in
just for the get-quick-rich scheme are not making it right now
because of how tough the market is.
Narrator: Madison says the size
of his company has helped keep him afloat.
Madison: You know, we could absorb that, those blows,
but a lot of people unfortunately couldn't.
Oh, we don't get big salaries.
Narrator: Madison said Parish Seafood Wholesale
saw $500,000 in profit last year,
and he paid himself just a $20,000 salary.
He also says he invested more
than 80% of the profit back into the company.
Madison: So if anything ever breaks, or if coolers go out,
we have backup everything.
You know, backup trucks, backup ice machines,
backup freezers, backup coolers.
We have multiple forklifts, which are all just luxuries.
Narrator: Because in an industry where one bad season
could send a company packing,
Madison has to fight to keep each crawfish alive.
Madison: I think, you know, in the next five or six years,
it'll be very lucrative again to be in this industry,
because there'll only be a handful of people doing it.
That's where it's at.